Athlete of the Week | Southeast basketball senior Garrett Sprutte leads, stars

PALMYRA TWP. — It's 3 in the afternoon and the Palace at Palmyra is finally empty.

The crowd from the Berkshire-Southeast girls basketball game has filed out the gymnasium.

The boys game is still several hours away.

Just after 3, roughly four hours from tip, Garrett Sprutte enters the gymnasium. After a few minutes, he is firing away, taking shots with his father serving as his rebounder.

A packed gymnasium was on hand to see Sprutte explode for 26 second-half points to top Field Saturday evening.

Few, on the other hand, saw the work that went into the senior's 31-point performance.

“When I arrived, Garrett was in the gym shooting,” Pirates coach Matt Dillon said. “In the summer, when this coaching staff got the job, the first thing we did was we went to Garrett and we said, 'Listen, here's what the coaching staff is going to expect from you,' and he's done everything that we've asked him to do and then more.”

What motivated the Record-Courier Athlete of the Week to spend those mid-afternoon hours in the gymnasium, rather than enjoying temperatures that drifted into the fifties?

“Just never being satisfied,” Sprutte said. “Even if I have a good game today, I'm still going to try to get better, no matter what. I'll be in here for three hours, if I need to, just to better my game.”

Sprutte's habits have been consistent. Showing up just past 3 wasn't extraordinary, not for Sprutte anyway.

“He's actually exceeded our expectations,” Dillon said. “Not just playing basketball. I'll be honest with you, probably more important has been his leadership. We were shooting in the mornings before school at 6 o'clock. He's the one that started that. We were doing stuff in the evenings in the summer. He was the one that was doing that. That wasn't the coaches. That was him.”

An early love for the game

Garrett Sprutte got to the gym early Saturday.

He got to the gym early, period.

Sprutte has been smitten with basketball for a long time, perhaps unsurprisingly given his older brother, Ty, and his father, Brian, played for the Pirates, with his father going on to play college hoops at Kent State University at Trumbull.

“Growing up, it was something he loved and he got that into me and my brother,” Sprutte said. “Ever since when we were young, it's just something that we've all done together as a family.”

Before long, Sprutte was playing up with his older brother and finding success.

“I've played since the second grade,” Sprutte said. “And the fifth grade was where I was like, ‘This is my thing. This is where my life is. Right here.’”

His experience, not to mention his height, helped him play a key role for the Pirates right away. Indeed, as a 6-2 sophomore, he averaged 10 points and six boards for Southeast.

A year later, Sprutte averaged a double-double (21.5 points, 11.5 rebounds), including an absurd 26-rebound performance against rival Rootstown. Oh, and he did all of that efficiently, making 52 percent of his shots from the field.

And this year?

Well, Sprutte's senior season started with a breathtaking 31-point, 17-rebound performance against the Falcons.

“I've seen it all,” Pirates freshman Cohen Richardson said. “He can do everything. He's a great player. I look up to him every day.”

An ability to take over a basketball game

The first half of Field-Southeast was chaos. Two fired-up teams played their hearts out.

Sprutte might have been a little too fired up himself. Perhaps that's how he picked up his third foul just three minutes into the second quarter. So Sprutte spent the rest of the first half on the bench, and then with the Pirates leading by two at halftime, took over in the final 16 minutes.

“We knew he was coming,” Falcons coach Alex Blake said. “We talked about the Pogo stick effect when he goes up and shoots the ball. If he knows it’s off, he's going right back up with it and he's going to go back up again. Like he's going to hit the floor and the ball is going to stay 6½ feet in the air, 7½ feet in the air. He's not bringing it down.”

As Blake mentioned, Sprutte does a lot of his damage in the paint. As skilled as he is, the senior is never above battling for rebounds.

That said, Sprutte changed Saturday's game permanently with a 3-pointer after Field drew within six.

“I've been working,” Sprutte said. “Last year, I wasn't such an efficient 3-point shooter, but I've been working on it a lot in the offseason, so I was like, if I am open, I'm getting the green light and I'm shooting it.”

Then came Sprutte's patented spin move as he tore down the baseline for a layup.

And when all was said and done, Dillon didn't fixate on one particular move or basket. Instead, the Southeast coach simply reflected on a senior who knows how to take over a game.

“The thing with Garrett is he understands how to play basketball, and that's because he grew up in a family that knows basketball,” Dillon said. “His dad's taught him a lot. He understands how to play basketball, and once he gets going he understands now's the time to kind of put your foot on the gas, and he did in that third and fourth quarter.”

This article originally appeared on Record-Courier: Athlete of the Week | Garrett Sprutte leads Southeast basketball